this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Bots subscribing to site--even with subscription URL is blocked in htaccess (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm using a self-hosted installation of PHPList to manage a newsletter.

Subscribers can be added via a POST to this URL:

https://www.[WEBSITE]/lists/?p=subscribe

It's presently overrun by bots.

I added this to .htaccess to block this URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=subscribe$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^ - [F]

Now, if you visit the subscription page above it will give a 403 error.

But, you can still add subscribers by using a POST to this URL.

How can I actually block folks from using this URL to subscribe?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Do you have any access logs on the server? Or can you enable them? Examine your logs and see what the bots are accessing, then block that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I know, I know 'BuT It's NOt seLFhOStEd!' but I just let the pros deal with bots and front that kind of stuff with Cloudflare.

If you've privacy concerns you can always have that one thing on a specific subdomain and only enable Cloudflare on that, whilst keeping the rest of your subdomains unproxied.

Alternatively can't you add a capture (again, giving up a bit of privacy).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This is one of the cases where there’s a real practical advantage to having a reverse proxy in front of your site/software. The proxy could be configured very easily to drop any access to that specific URL .